Multiple Personality in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Relatively few visit the blog “Normal Novelists have-use-enjoy Multiple Personality” from USA and England.

Multiple personality and other types of posttraumatic dissociation are found around the world (1). So it is not surprising that this blog has been visited from more than fifty countries. But it may surprise you to learn that relatively few visits come from the USA, and almost none from England.

There is a myth that multiple personality is popular in the USA. Indeed, a professor of American Studies in Germany—land of the doppelgänger!—has published a book about multiple personality in American literature (2). But most Americans think of multiple personality as a literary gimmick. And in creative writing programs, instead of recognizing multiple personality, they speak of “voice” (3).

However, if there is any country where multiple personality is even less popular than it is in the USA, it is England. At least in the USA, multiple personality gets grudging respect professionally (4). Whereas in England, as I pointed out in a past post on dictionaries of literary terms, they have nothing to say about the theme of the double, but a lot to say about ghosts.

1. George F. Rhoades Jr., Vedat Sar (Editors). Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon. New York, Haworth Press, 2005.

2. Heike Schwarz. Beware the Other Side(s): Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction. American Studies, Volume 8, Transcript, 2013.

3. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

4. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.